


on top of the world

by mortalitasi



Series: hil do lok [5]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen, Reflection, Thinking™, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 14:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15121631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: Liette has time to think about everything that could possibly go wrong before she ascends the Monahven to face Alduin one last time.She hopes Sovngarde is as nice as the tales say—or that, at least, the ale is half as good.





	on top of the world

**Author's Note:**

> just uploading archived writing that i realize i'd never published here, oops.
> 
> considering my girl is Old As Balls™, jumping headlong into another great showdown with an "evil" that wants to EAT THE ENTIRE WORLD!!! is probably seeming like a really bad rerun of an outdated action show to her, except she has no choice but to be the protagonist.
> 
> (she honestly wanted to quit this whole 'hero' thing way back in the second era, but we saw how that went)

An emptiness unlike anything she’s ever known sits in her breast, gaping below her heart, so powerful it is almost a physical wound. This place is old—very old. So old that she can feel the weight of the history in her bones, resting in every draw of air she takes.

She lets out a quiet sigh, watching her breath steam away above her into the gloom. The temple is bitterly cold, even if its inner sanctum is not open to the sky, and dark: a chilling, uneasy dark that happens to gather around hallowed places that are abandoned for too long, where experiences and spirits converge and the very walls resonate with memory.

She wonders if the Blades are watching her even now, though she cannot see them. She can imagine them, filling the room, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a spectral audience, their eyes, made blind by centuries of sight, trained on her, following every rise of her hand and every tremor of breath.

Their presence fills the stone hall, pressing against the soft planes of her throat and making it difficult to move. Delphine does not seem to feel it as acutely—Esbern might, she thinks, watching him in the glow of her magelight. The old man has not said a word since the entrance to the hall yawned open to them. He is not as eager as his junior, more careful with his words, frugal with his magic, but forthcoming with the history.

Neither of the humans know she has had more than enough of the Blades. Too much to stomach, honestly. Some nights she closes her eyes and still the face of Martin appears before her as he was when she first found him– covered in soot, wearing priest’s robes, working on his hands and knees in the camp with dirt up to his elbows. Sorrowed. Distraught. Dismayed at the loss of Kvatch. He’d turned to her when she’d called his name, and she’d felt a thrill at the likeness of the Septim king she’d seen there. How alike they had looked, and how little Martin had known before she spoke to him.

He’d been a good man. And good men, she’s learned, always seem destined to die early.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the meager light of Esbern’s torch, Alduin’s Wall is shadowed and unearthly, a thing out of time and place. She feels so endlessly small, standing there before the sprawling relief of Alduin caught shrieking in the clutches of Dragonrend. She has lived a man’s lifetime too many times over to count—but all the years inside her melt away in this place, until she’s nothing more than a grain of sand caught in a tempest. Compared to the dovah she is but a child, bumbling, almost newborn, and it has been centuries since she has felt anything close to young.

But here in the gloom the sensation returns to her, and she can almost remember why she had been so very eager to grow up.

“Shor’s beard,” Esbern says for a second time this day.

She turns away from the wall, trying to ignore the buzzing in her head; it’s as though the place is too full and too desolate all at once, too much—it’s everything she tried to escape from by crossing the border into Skyrim: the substance, the responsibility, the importance.

Is nothing she does a choice of her own? Is it written in the stars, somewhere, that she’s not destined to die, instead condemned to watch, armed with wretched good luck, as the ages trickle by and the world goes on? The people in this land vie for what they think is an honorable passing. Couldn’t it have been one of them, happy to go to Sovngarde with a knife between their teeth?

They are so eager to be remembered and dead and glorious that they forget to live in the first place; and here is she, scrambling inside the worn husk of the shell the gods have built for her, recoiling from it all. She wishes she could forget, and that she could die, like the rest of them do. That she could know what it means to not be alone.

The torchlight flickers as she moves closer, a hand straying near the freezing stone. The tips of her fingers brush against Alduin’s grasping talons, and the cut on her palm aches at the stretch.

The silence and cold make the images in the wall all the more terrible. She has seen Alduin from afar, never close enough to engage, but the ghost of his presence has followed her since Helgen: the heat of his words, the rush of the blood around her heart swelling into a white-hot burn with the rage in his Thu'um. If there was ever to be a harbinger for this world’s end, it could have been no one but him. She had had no name for him in Helgen, when he’d visited his wrath on the ground and the sky and had torn through the roofs of houses with his claws as though the brick and thatch were nothing more than mere parchment.

There had been a moment where all she could do was watch—hunched over the headsman’s block like a fool, hands bound behind her, the long strands of her hair covering her eyes. They should have cut her hair to properly behead her, she recalls thinking, wondering why the Imperials had forgone their usual thoroughness for such a sloppy execution. She had not understood then why they had been so eager to pit Ulfric’s neck against an axe-blade. Perhaps she wishes she never had, but it is too late to long for ignorance.

Too much has happened for that.

She startles when Delphine pulls up an old chair, the sound of the wood against the rocky floor harsh and disturbing.

“So we came all this way for nothing,” the Breton says, sitting and slamming her shield down on the table. Her blue eyes flash in the darkness, glinting with frustration. “Nothing but myths and dust and whispers. What good will a story do in the face of Alduin? We need weapons, Esbern, not the dreams of dead men.”

The older man turns to her, and he seems to have aged a hundred years just by standing there, drawn and reflective. “Patience, Delphine,” he admonishes gently, and Liette has the feeling this is not the first time the two humans have had this conversation. “All myths have a grain of truth in them, do they not? The Dragonborn stands here with us, in this very room. That must count for something.”

An uncomfortable prickling washes down Liette’s spine as Delphine affixes her with an unreadable stare—a cross between an impassive expression and a deep, wrinkled grimace. She suspects Delphine was not nearly as subtle at a younger age. Sort of amazing she’s managed to get this far without being knifed in the face. A few moments pass in a painful silence, pulled thin like leather too-hurriedly drawn over a tanning rack. Esbern is taking a seat as well when Liette draws the cowl of her hood back over her head and brings a small orb of magelight to life between her palms.

“Will you stay?” she asks Esbern quietly, and watches as he throws a glance at Delphine, who is busy trying to burn holes through Alduin’s Wall with her gaze.

“We will,” Esbern says. “It is not unclean here, and it is a good hiding place.”

Liette nods absently, trying not to look back at the wall she is leaving behind. “I make for High Hrothgar,” she replies, already dreading the long journey up. Delphine does not acknowledge her as she passes.

“Talos guide you, Dragonborn,” the scholar murmurs as she reaches the archway preceding the hall. She ducks away around the corner, making as though she had not heard.

Ah, if he only knew how bloody unreliable the gods are.

 

* * *

  

She is sure the stableboy and guards of Ivarstead tire of seeing her and will one day drive her out of their little town-village, but that day is not today. She unsaddles Frost herself and asks the stableboy to brush him down, giving the horse a last pat of consolidation before she leaves him to the comfort of his stall. Most nights Frost is not so lucky.

He sleeps tethered to her tent, or to a nearby tree, when she can find one, and sometimes there is no time for her to relieve him of his burdens or unpack the saddlebags. He is a good steed, reliable, strong, and hardy; perhaps the only friend she has on the lonely road, and the only follower she trusts not to talk. Lydia is lovely, perhaps a touch too loyal, but Liette doesn’t trust. Alone has always worked better for her, even in the earliest of her years.

The walk to the base of the steps is quiet—but she knows it is a deceptive quiet, for even as the darkness falls and the mountain grows still, there is yet stirring of things unseen deep in the bowels of High Hrothgar, and these things are not partial to night or day, waking only to the slope and peak of their hunger. The first time she’d risen to the challenge of the steps she had learned that it mattered little what part of the day she picked to make the ascent. The frost trolls, though usually nocturnal, had exceptions which preferred the daylight hours to prowl.

The goats never slept. And the pilgrims were unrelenting.

Answers. This has all been in the quest for answers, and she is no nearer to knowing if there will be any at the end of this journey—but she has to hope there will be. There must always be hope, if nothing else, no matter how tattered and now matter how small.

Perhaps now she will face the Greybeards and get something more than riddles.

She tilts her head upward, looking at the looming mass of the Throat of the World, and breathes.


End file.
